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Originally Posted by Haesslich
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As I said, the second option was that they may have resampled - I can tell you that my AWE32 loved 44.1KHz playback, but I've heard some other cards were a little scratchy anyways. I know they weren't all that great at handling anything about 11-bit sound, at any rate... from what I recall of reviews of the SB16 Value, for example, they indicated sound quality took a nosedive after you passed that barrier.
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Yup, early SB's sometimes had problems with the digital channel(s), not to mention the digital noise marring FM synthesized sounds too. Back in late 1990, when I bought my first SB 1.5 (it costed me a real fortune!), all my Amiga owner friends laughed at the noisy FM synthezis and the really sub-par one-channel 8-bit digital outout of my card (which costed about half of an Amiga 500 back then...)
For example, when I coded my MOD player back in 1991 (in x86 assembly), I still preferred using a pair of 8-bit D/A's on the printer port because of the uch superior, stereo digital sound.
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For a PocketPC game, this thing's impressive and probably the best translation of Broken Sword for a portable unit to date (the GBA one's much more pixelated, for example).
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Yup, agree.
My point is: the PPC version of Broken Sword is by far the best (handheld) port so far. It's just incomparably better than the Palm OS and the GBA version. The GBA can't be better because of the hardware limitations (low-res screen); the Palm OS version could be much better because of the HiRes+ (480*320) resolution and the capable hardware (stereo 44 kHz digital channels). Graphics-wise (real 640*480 on PPC, not a pixelizated crap unlike on HiRes+ Palm devices) it
really excels on the Pocket PC.
However, the sound of the PPC version could be even better with an add-on pack and/or midi-based (not digitized sound like now!) music. If the original version of the game had had 11+ kHz sound (this is what I don't know at all as I still don't have the original version), an additional, reconverted/resampled speech pack would be really nice, even if we had to sacrifice a lot of additional memory card space.
Music ditto. Now, the music is digitised, also at either 8 or 11 kHz, resulting in a comparatively-not-that-good-quality - not at all midi and/or wavetable-based, which, I think, the original surely (?) was.
Don't take me wrong: I love the game and I recommend it to everyone, particularly to VGA users and particularly now that it's (still) available at AstraWare for $20 only. It's by far the best PPC adventure game now and clearly beats everything else. As a computing & hardware & coder freak who knows what the Pocket PC hardware is capable of, however, I clearly know how the game could be made
much better, voice and music quality-wise. An add-on quality (sampled at 22 / 44 kHz; the music preferably in stereo) speech/music pack would make the game the bets, music / voice-wise too.